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Posts related to scalability

  • Lost messages are just as bad as lost luggage

    Written by David Boike on April 4, 2023

    You’re standing in the airport, waiting to pick up your bag. Did you ever stop to think about all the software systems involved in tracking your luggage on your journey? From the moment you drop it off at your departure airport to the moment you breathe that sigh of relief as it shows up on the baggage carousel is a complex story of messaging and system integrations.

    I recently had the opportunity to chat with the lead developer for the luggage arrival system at a major Asian international hub. 1 He told me how using NServiceBus made it possible to get all the systems in the airport to work together reliably.

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    1. Unfortunately, it's impossible to name names without getting a bunch of lawyers involved. The names have been changed (well, just omitted) to protect the innocent.

    2. Well, hopefully. The bag source messages really represent the bags checked in from the outbound port, not the aircraft. So there's no way to know whether a bag made it onto the aircraft! 😬

  • What Starbucks can teach us about software scalability

    Written by Weronika Łabaj on April 7, 2016
    Starbucks Drive Thru

    In 2004, Gregor Hohpe published his brilliant post “Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit.” When I read it, my time working at Starbucks during my college years suddenly became relevant. Over the years, I gradually realized there’s even more that programmers can learn from the popular coffee chain.

    Although many people may want to build scalable software, it can be much harder than it first appears. As we work on individual tasks, we can fall into a trap, believing all things are equally important, need the same resources, and happen synchronously in a predefined order.

    It turns out they don’t—at least not in scalable systems, and certainly not at Starbucks.

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